Define Your Best Customer

To be more effective at developing relationships, one should always take time to describe their best customer. This is the customer that gives you the biggest bang for your buck. This customer is the one that pays bills on time, uses you exclusively for all their business needs in your area of expertise. It is also a customer that you have an excellent working relationship. This customer knows they can rely on you for the services you specialize in and you will go out of your way to make sure that they are happy at all times. And if they are not happy, they know they can rely on you to solve the problem, fix it, and come to a win-win solution for them. This customer is the one that knows you are the best solution to their business pain.

You are the one to help them through troubled times and come out on the other end making them more profitable (and you at the same time). This relationship will develop with ease and not take long periods of time to gel. This customer is the one where you can focus your energies and be able to help them focus on their core competencies at all times. The customer that is best for you is also the customer that is best for another competitor. These customers must be nurtured and not left out to dry. It is important that you have a process in place that will allow you to make sure this customer is always happy.

For example, one day I came across a small HR company that specialized in sales personnel. The company was working with many types of clients but found that certain customers brought in more money than others. It was then that the company decided to profile their best customers. Using the profile, they spent more time concentrating their sales and marketing efforts on the potential customers that fit the profile. The result showed that for the same effort they were making more money and not wasting time on clients that did not pay off.

Now that you know who your best customer is, you should look more closely at defining how you express what you do best. Often called an elevator pitch, the words that you choose to describe your business, need to be very short and to the point. The pitch also needs to be positioned so that your identified best customer can easily understand what you do and how you can help them.

Bette Daoust, Ph.D. has been networking with others since leaving high school years ago. Realizing that no one really cared about what she did in life unless she had someone to tell and excite, She decided to find the best ways to get people's attention, be creative in how she presented herself and products, getting people to know who she was, and being visible all the time. Her friends and colleagues have often dubbed her the "Networking Queen".

Blueprint for Networking Success: 150 ways to promote yourself is the first in this series. Blueprint for Branding Yourself: Another 150 ways to promote yourself is planned for release in June 2005. For more information visit http://BlueprintBooks.com